 We continue our work on a Jungian Approach to Dream Interpretation. Today's episode involves the types of compensatory dreams we may have and an examination of the difference between an objective and a subjective interpretive approach to a dream. Let's start by turning our attention to something that we've touched on before and that is the process of compensation. Recall I said that most dreams are of a compensatory type. Compensation, of course, is the natural balancing function of a psyche so the dream compensates for the ego's stance. But what does this look like and what types of compensation are possible in a psyche in the form of dreams? Jung argued that there are three compensatory positions possible in dreams. These are, first, the conscious attitude is one-sided so the dream provides the opposite position. Second, the conscious attitude is correct so the dream affirms this position. And third, the conscious attitude is in the middle so the dream coincides with this. I'm going to create some mini-dreams to try and give you examples of how these three positions can arise in dreams. All these examples, of course, are quite fictitious. What would the first form of compensation being the dream provides the opposite position to your one-sided ego stance look like in a dream? Let's say that you had a very one-sided conscious attitude towards your work viewing your work as the whole reason to get up in the morning as providing for all your needs as the central aspect of your life. You clearly have a one-sided approach to your external world and that is that all that involves is work. One night you had a dream in which you went to work but no one recognized you and your desk had disappeared and in fact you no longer had any idea what you actually did at work. Suddenly you find yourself outside sitting by a lake with your husband talking about how well the kids are doing as they grow up. You feel calm as you chat with your husband. Finally you walk to your car and your husband says to you I like talking with you like this. I wish we could spend more days each week by the lake just hanging out. And that's the end of the dream. The dream alerts you to the problem which is overwork and radically reverses your reliance on work to fulfill all your needs. The solution to the dream is one in which you are given a possible conscious attitude of how to be instead of living as a workaholic. Let's look at the form of compensation where your dream confirms that you're holding onto a conscious attitude that works for the psyche. Let's take the same dreamer we just used before and imagine that she is well aware that she has to balance out her life and her work and her family life. Her dream is as follows. I was at work speaking to my manager. My manager was asking me how to make the perfect loaf of bread. I said that so long as you had four cups of white flour to every cup of whole wheat flour the bread will rise perfectly and your family will love it. That's the dream. The dreamer may have been aware of her work and home relationships and chosen to work a four day week taking the fifth day off to be with her family. In other words, four days of work with the fifth day at home. Just as in her dream this balance was perfect and her family enjoyed the dream of being at home on Fridays. So the dream affirms the mix between work and home life or four parts of white flour to one part of whole wheat flour. The third type of compensatory dream is one in which I'm sure you can work out an example for yourself by now. A final word about compensatory dreams from Carl Jung. In the following quote, he outlines the difference between compensatory and prospect of dreams. And the quote starts, I should like to distinguish between the prospect of function of dreams and the compensatory function. The latter means that the unconscious, considered as relative to consciousness, adds to the conscious situation all those elements from the previous day which remain subliminal because of repression or because they were simply too feeble to reach consciousness. This compensation in the sense of being a self-regulation of the psychic organism must be called purposive. The prospect of function on the other hand is an anticipation in the unconscious of future conscious achievements. Something like a preliminary exercise or sketch or a plan roughed out in advance. The occurrence of prospective dreams cannot be denied. It would be wrong to call them prophetic because at bottom they are no more prophetic than a medical diagnosis or a weather forecast. They are merely an anticipatory combination of probabilities which may coincide with the actual behavior of things but need not necessarily agree in every detail. And that's from Jung's collected works, volume 8, paragraphs 492 and 493. Jung then warns about the misuse of prospective dreams by saying the following, and I quote, although the prospect of function is, in my view, an essential characteristic of dreams, one would do well not to overestimate this function for one might easily be led to suppose that the dream is a kind of psychopomp which because of its superior knowledge infallibly guides life in the right direction, end quote. And that's from collected works, volume 8, paragraph 494. Of crucial importance to our understanding of how we go about interpreting a dream is the issue of whether we should work from an objective interpretive stance or a subjective interpretive stance. In short, the difference between the approaches speaks to how we react to the dream. In an objective approach, the dream is viewed as making a direct commentary on an external world issue, such as how you deal with a colleague at work or how you treat your kids. The subjective stance, on the other hand, relies on the idea that all the parts of the dream are parts of yourself. In an objective interpretation, the dream is a direct comment on a real-world experience. In other words, the dream comments on an inter-psychic issue. Inter-psychic means between you and another or others, whereas the word intra-psychic refers to within you. For an objective approach, a key idea is that if the laws of physics hold in the dream and that known people, places or events are the components of the dream, you may well consider taking an objective stance to the dream interpretation. So you wouldn't walk through walls, you wouldn't see dragons, a dead relative wouldn't appear, your parents, if they're still alive, the age they are today and they look like they do today and they act like they do today. Taken from this standpoint, the dream is more of a direct report on the way you are handling issues external to you. One should always examine the dream text for the possibility of an objective, interpretive approach first. If this does not appear possible, then and only then can you move to a subjective approach. As I mentioned above, in a subjective interpretation, all aspects of the dream are aspects of the dreamer's personality, which means that you in the dream are a dream ego. A female figure in the dream, if you are male, often represents your anima and if you are a female dreamer, your shadow. A male figure in the dream may represent the animus in a female dreamer and the shadow in a male dreamer. Taken from a subjective interpretive stance, the dream is a comment on the relationships within one's psyche. In other words, yours. It is an intra-psychic comment. There is a third interpretive stance that I will just mention and that is that the dream represents a comment on the transference in the analytic encounter. I'll cover this in a later episode on analysis.